Chips: Ukrainian naive mosaics, 1950–90

The photobook "Chips: Ukrainian Naive Mosaics, 1950–90" by photographer Yevgeny Nikiforov and art historian Polina Baytsim documents a vanishing phenomenon on the periphery of art and social life. The archive, collected during the years 2013–2023, conceived as a book in 2019, presents mosaics of unknown authors in a state of semi-disintegration — when they have already lost their original glow, crumble or go to the lower layers of facades and city panoramas. Naive mosaics are often an everyday background for local residents or an inconvenient and problematic material in the transformation processes of public spaces. In the book, they find themselves in the focus of attention as a phenomenon that raises questions about memory and space, past and present, self-expression and imitation, and also captures the fragility of the monumental, which, like chips, eventually became a crumb at the bottom of the stack.